Have you checked this https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/events? There are some meetups in Berkeley.
Leo
Karma: 266
Legal Priorities Summer Institute
The Economics of Animal Welfare
I think this is very useful. Added.
Langzeitigkeit
Langzeitethizismus
But I think the best is the already proposed ‘Langzeitethik’.
Great article! Another thing I just realized: I dislike the clock metaphor. It seems to suggest that we will eventually reach midnight, no matter what. Perhaps a time bomb (which can be deactivated) would be a better illustration.
My version tried to be an intuitive simplification of the core of Bostrom’s paper. I actually don’t identify these assumptions you mention. If you are right, I may have presupposed them while reading the paper, or my memory may be betraying me for the sake of making sense of it. Anyway, I really appreciate you took the time to comment.
I would like to understand how that is a valid objection, because I honestly don’t see it. To simplify a bit, if you think that 1 (‘humanity won’t reach a posthuman stage’) and 2 (‘posthuman civilizations are extremely unlikely to run vast numbers of simulations’) are false, it follows that humanity will probably both reach a posthuman stage and run a vast number of simulations. Now if you really think this will probably happen, I can see no reason to deny that it has already happened in the past. Why postulate that we will be the first simulators? There’s no empirical evidence to support it, given that we are talking about extremely detailed, realistic simulations, and as it was already agreed that simulations are so many, it seems very, very unlikely that we are located at the first level. In other words, if one believes that intelligent life is part of a process which normally culminates with a massive ancestor-simulation program, the fact that there is intelligent life is not enough to find out in what part of the process it is located.
crucial information! I.e., we know that we are not in any of the simulations that we have produced.
I think the point has to do with belief consistency here. If you believe that our posthuman descendants will probably run a vast number of simulations of their ancestors (the negation of the second and first alternatives), then you have to accept that the particular case of being a non-simulated civilization is one in a vast number, and therefore highly improbable, and therefore we are almost certainly living in a simulation. You cannot know that you are not in a simulation because you are supposed to believe that huge numbers of simulations are probably run by post-human civilizations.
Maybe he meant simulating our ancestors someday would be evidence that advanced posthuman civilization in general simulate their ancestors. But if so, who are these other posthuman civilizations? Where do they exist? Why should we think they exist?
If we could run a vast number of simulations someday, that would be strong statistical evidence in favor of the third alternative. And we would know nothing of them, just as people living in our simulations wouldn’t know anything about us.
[Edited this, because I had mistaken the order of alternatives]
Check this
Actually they did:
In 1784, the French mathematician Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour wrote a parody of Benjamin Franklin’s then-famous Poor Richard’s Almanack. In it, Mathon de la Cour joked that Franklin would be in favour of investing money to grow for hundreds of years and then be spent on utopian projects. Franklin, amused, thanked Mathon de la Cour for the suggestion, and left £1,000 each to the cities of Philadelphia and Boston in his will. This money was to be invested and only to be spent a full 200 years after his death. As time went by, the money grew, and in 1990 Boston received an impressive $5 million and Philadelphia $2.3 million, which was spent on charitable causes on behalf of Ben Franklin.[1]
All of these are arguably either neglected or less-discussed, or at least that’s what the posts discussing these causes suggest. I suppose the same goes for your posts (I just didn’t have the time to read them in detail yet) and that’s why I lean towards including them.
I’ll add them soon, thanks! Yes, you’re right about the beneficial influence of improving institutional decision-making over other causes. This is something that occurs very frequently between other causes as well (though not always, as the meat eater problem has shown). I look forward to reading that post.
Thanks for raising this point. I agree that such category could include enhancements not strictly limited to “being smarter”. I think this is a legitimate cause area, but I’m not sure if I would include Magnus’s excellent post. I just don’t feel he is proposing this as a cause area. . . Anyway, the real reason I didn’t include it was far more trivial: It was published in April and this update is supposed to cover up to March. I’m thinking about ways of extending the limit and keeping this up to date on a regular basis.
There is a rough draft. I’ll try to update it and let you know.
Added. This is a great contribution. Thanks a lot!
I like that one very much, but I stopped listing posts in March, that’s why it is not included. Thanks anyway.
Added. Thanks!
I believe this happens because , to my knowledge, German words ending in -ismus are only combined with proper names (‘Marxismus’) or foreign words (specially adjectives), that is Lehnwörter, like ‘Liberalismus’, ‘Föderalismus’. But I’m not a native speaker, so I can’t really tell how “exotic” this neologism sounds.